Who Was Harriet Tubman? A Historian Sifts the Clues.
NIGHT FLYER: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, by Tiya Miles
Harriet Tubman led such an eventful life — so filled with hardship, extreme peril and close calls — that even an atheist might find it hard to deny that her nine decades of survival on this Earth were nothing short of miraculous.
Tubman herself credited God with guiding her dangerous work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad during the 1850s; she made an estimated 13 trips below the Mason-Dixon line and spirited as many as 80 souls north, often all the way to Canada. Tubman’s own escape in 1849 was legendary. After a first attempt with her brothers, who were so frightened that they insisted on turning back to their enslaver’s estate near the Chesapeake Bay, an undaunted Tubman made the treacherous 90-mile journey from Maryland to Pennsylvania on her own.
“Where others saw shut doors and unscalable brick walls, she dreamed into being tunnels and ladders,” the historian Tiya Miles writes in “Night Flyer,” a short biography of Tubman that is the first in a new series, called Significations and edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., about notable Black figures. For decades after her death in 1913, Tubman’s extraordinary life was mostly relegated to books for children and young adults. Thorough, probing biographies by the historians Catherine Clinton and Kate Clifford Larson were published two decades ago. More recently, Tubman was the subject of a Hollywood biopic and “She Came to Slay,” an illustrated volume by the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, featuring a drawing of a pistol-toting Tubman on the cover.
Perhaps inevitably, all the pop-cultural attention has been double-edged, commemorating Tubman’s formidable accomplishments while also making it harder to discern who she actually was. Miles admits that before she started this project, Tubman “had become a stock figure in my imagination, a known hero in the cast of characters that we might call the abolitionist avengers.” Recognizing Tubman’s idiosyncrasies and physical ailments “resizes Tubman the cultural icon to human scale.”
Miles calls “Night Flyer” a “faith biography,” emphasizing Tubman’s spirituality along with her ecological awareness, expressed as a profound attentiveness to the natural world. Miles also draws on the life stories of “similar women,” such as the preachers Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw, to try to illuminate some of the more interior experiences that Tubman took care to keep hidden.
Such gaps in the historical record are familiar to Miles. Having written about Indigenous people and African Americans, including in the National Book Award-winning “All That She Carried,” she frequently faces what she has called “the conundrum of the archives.” Tubman did not read or write; she dictated her life story to “typically white, middle-class, antislavery women,” like her first biographer, Sarah Bradford. Although usually “well-meaning,” Tubman’s amanuenses sometimes “demeaned” her, casting her as an exotic, almost otherworldly figure.
